“Game day” is a long-standing tradition at Facebook. In order to extend the practice to community members, the company held a game day for kids.

On July 30, 300 first-through-fifth-graders played field games with more than 100 Facebook interns at Hoover Field in Redwood City. “We created this opportunity to encourage conversation between hundreds of local youth and Facebook high school and college interns,” said Susan Gonzales, Facebook’s director of community engagement. “Our hope is that these young students begin asking their parents and teachers about college and technology after spending the afternoon with many students studying computer science. The founder of the next Facebook could be in our backyard, and we are committed to encouraging students to pursue an education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).”

The high school interns attend a six-week program called Facebook Academy. The Academy is Gonzales’ brainchild and offers summer internships to incoming high school juniors from underserved communities in the Bay Area. These very fortunate students learn about information technology and other aspects of the industry, including marketing and Internet security.

Rosie Valencia is a junior at Sequoia High School and interned at the Facebook Academy this summer. “I was really happy to be assigned to IT (Information Technology) because I’m very interested in computer science and engineering,” she said. “I rotated among three different groups within IT: the Help Desk (where Facebook employees go for one-on-one IT help), Logistics and Audiovisual Services (AV). I had a different mentor during each rotation. I especially liked the hands-on aspect of working at the Help Desk. Overall, I loved the open and free environment at Facebook, and the fact that you can do whatever you want as long as you get your work done.”

While interning, Rosie learned to code and created an innovative app that enables community members to find and clean up trash and graffiti in and around their neighborhood. “My app is called Tag It,” she said. “A user takes a photo of an area that needs cleaning due to garbage or graffiti, and the photo pops up on a map. This enables people to communicate better about keeping their community clean.”

Rosie will be the first in her family to graduate from high school and attend college. “I’ve lived in East Palo Alto my whole life and am the oldest of four and the only girl. My parents are divorced. I share a dad with my two younger, twin half-brothers,” she said. “I definitely want to study computer science in college and be a software engineer at a tech company — hopefully Facebook! I have always wanted to go to college on the East Coast. My dream school is NYU, but I’m a little worried about being so far from my family.”

This is the first year Facebook opened up its concept of a game day to the local community, and, as far as I could see, the kids and the interns — who looked and acted very much like taller versions of the kids they consorted with — had a blast. Perhaps it is one of the reasons Forbes magazine named Facebook one of the five best places to work.

Facebook’s commitment to local schools and youth organizations is commendable and really smart. They are tapping into our most valuable resource and blazing the trail for, as Gonzales so aptly stated, “the founder of the next Facebook.” Other Bay Area companies would be prudent to follow in their munificent, farsighted footsteps.

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